Improving… medical care

Well, if it’s one thing folks shouldn’t be complaining about, it should be the PPP’s commitment to delivering better health care – and still free to boot to all and sundry!! Now we know we were starting from below ground zero after Burnham and the PNC screwed up the rather effective system he inherited from the Brits. Imagine his Minister of Health at one time was Hamilton Green!! Explains a lot, doesn’t it??
The decades that followed pretty much saw reclamation projects of hospitals – cottage, regional and the sole tertiary one in GT. Now, with money coming down the (oil) pipeline, not only have the aforementioned hospitals been completely refurbished and equipped – but have been augmented by new Regional Hospitals at Enmore, Anna Regina, Region Two; De Kinderen, Region Three; Diamond, Region Four; Bath, Region Five and Number 75 Village, Region Six, that are up and running!! Frankly, your Eyewitness has trouble keeping up with all the new hospitals – because he just remembered that multibillion, state-of-the-art paediatric and maternal hospital at Ogle that shoulda been completed.
But no matter how you cut it, dice it, or puree it, hospitals ain’t just new buildings! They can only deliver better health care if they’re properly staffed and equipped with the best diagnostic and interventionary equipment!! On the staffing side, we gotta candidly accept that THAT challenge is still open. That the developed first-world countries face the same challenge is of no comfort – since we know that “death and sickness wait for no man”! Very frankly we’ve got to bite the bullet and at least use all the inceptives we can to not only allow us to retain the medical personnel we got – but to attract new ones from foreign!! The main incentive, of course, being salaries!! Here we gotta match the scales in the US and Canada – where many of our practitioners gravitate.
But on the challenge of having enough doctors to service the new hospitals, one thing has always puzzled your (naive?) Eyewitness. How come the doctors in the employ of GPHC and the MoH at that institution are all ALSO employed by the private hospitals??!! Do their schedules allow ALL of them to have second jobs?? And doesn’t this give credence to frequent accusations that these double dippers bring their “private patients” to GPHC – where they not only use public facilities for their private gain but also jump the line over regular patients?
Anyhow, all of this was brought about by the announcement that FINALLY GPHC’s gonna have its FIRST MRI imaging machine – to catch those pesky diseases that escape X-ray, CT scan and ultrasound ones.
Maybe we can now integrate AI to assist doctors in reading the images and make diagnoses??

…contract awards?
One of the constant complaints made by Government critics is that the latter hands out big-time contracts to “friends and family” – and then closes their eyes to under- and late completions!! But the abovementioned incomplete Maternal and Paediatric Hospital at Ogle is proof positive that the story ain’t that simple. And the fault, dear Readers, doesn’t claim that the govt is purer than Caesar’s wife! – might lie elsewhere,
Over two years ago, President Ali – not one to hide his emotions! – made his feelings known about the failure of the contractor to keep to the schedule for completing the hospital! The project came out of an MoU between Guyana and Austria – with the EUR $149 million (GUY $31.9 billion) contracts for the hospital backed by the UK. It was signed in June 2022 – with work starting the next year.
The Austrian contractor VAMED Engineering was appointed by the Austrian govt. Since then, ownership changes to a German company didn’t help matters!!
So much for Teutonic efficiency!!

…oil contract terms?
Your Eyewitness notes call for renegotiation of the oil contract just ain’t letting up. But why’s the obvious route being ignored? CNOOC owns 25 per cent of the operation – and they’re owned by the sanctimonious Chinese Govt.
Picket their embassy!!